XII
things that go bump in the night
TRIXIE HAD BEEN with us a year when she did something nearly as mystifying as her reaction when I told her that I knew she was an angel posing as a dog.
Gerda and I were sitting up in bed, reading, about ready to turn off the lights and go to sleep.
Trixie got up from her bed to get a drink. On her way back to the corner, she performed one of those cute-as-it-gets stretches in which her rump raised high, the rest of her sloped down toward the floor, her legs thrust straight out in front of her, and her toes spread wide as if all the weariness in her muscles were pouring forward through her body and draining out through her forepaws.
No sooner had she settled down than she leaped up again, ran past our bed, and vanished through the open door into the upstairs hall.
Because we had looked up from our books to watch Trixie stretch, our attention remained on her when she hurriedly split. She had never raced off like this before, and we both thought, Intruder.
I had set the perimeter alarm prior to settling down to read, but perhaps someone had already been in the house when I activated the system. Such an unlikely event had happened a couple of years earlier, before we had Trixie.
One night, we went out for dinner and forgot to arm the security system. When we came home, we entered from the garage, went straight up the main stairs to the master suite, locked the door behind us, and set the alarm to night mode, which engaged all doors and windows but also motion detectors in the hallways. We didn’t know an intruder was in the house, lurking in a second-floor study when we returned.
The computerized voice of the alarm announced any change in conditions by way of the house music-system speakers. Therefore, the trespasser in the study knew he was trapped in that space by the motion detector in the hallway, which would trigger a siren and call the police with a recorded message if he moved through its field of observation. Apparently, he settled down to wait and think.
Feeling as safe as Pooh and Tigger in the most benign district of their entirely comfortable forest, Gerda and I got ready for bed, sat up reading for an hour or two, and then went to sleep. At two in the morning, the alarm screamed, and the Hal-9000 voice informed us that someone had opened the study window.
Because that window was on the second floor, fifteen feet above the walkway along the south side of the house, reachable from outside only with a ladder, we assumed the alarm must be false. After turning off the security system, I went to the study to check for corrosion of the contact points between window and sill—and discovered the window open.
Yikes. I hurried back to the master bedroom, armed myself, and returned cautiously to the study and peered out of the open window. No ladder. Someone had opened the window to flee the house, not to invade. He had dropped onto a rain-shelter roof over a first-floor side door directly below, cracking a couple of cedar shingles, and from there he had jumped to the walkway.
After brooding on his situation, the trapped intruder had most likely decided that the second-floor windows might not be tied into the alarm system. Many people save money by not wiring hard-to-reach windows.
Fortunately, the folks from whom we bought the house were paranoid enough to wire even those openings that could be reached only by the ape from Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. Otherwise, our uninvited guest might have escaped without anyone knowing that he’d been there. When the window was found open, I or Gerda would have assumed that the other had left it that way, for ventilation.
Now, two years later, when Trixie sprang off her bed and raced into the upstairs hall, we wondered if the intruder had returned or perhaps had recommended our accommodations to a criminal pal. Trixie neither growled nor barked, but then she rarely did either, and it was possible that she hoped the intruder might have a cookie or a tennis ball.
When I followed her into the hall, I found her standing near the door to Gerda’s office. She was gazing up, as though making eye contact with someone about my height, smiling and wagging her tail.
I said, “Trixie, what’s happening?”
Ignoring me, still appearing to be attentive to someone I could not see, she padded out of the hallway and into Gerda’s dark office.
Even if Trixie might be hesitant to bark at a burglar, her sudden appearance would have startled a yelp out of him if he’d been in Gerda’s sanctum. I followed the dog across the threshold and switched on the light.
She stood at a far corner of Gerda’s desk, still peering up at something, bright-eyed and engaged. Her tail swished, swished.
A tail is a communications device, a compensation for not having the capacity for language. Its position and its motion—or lack of motion—can convey a dog’s mood and intentions. With its tail, a dog talks to other dogs, to people, to cats, to all manner of creatures.
Rarely if ever does a dog wag its tail at an inanimate object. Even the dumbest dog knows the difference between inanimate objects and living beings that might be able to read what it is saying in tail speak.
Trixie returned around Gerda’s desk, still looking up as if the invisible man had stepped out of a movie and into our home. She remained oblivious of me, responding not at all when I spoke her name and called her to me.
In the hall again, she paused, grinning up at her make-believe friend. She did a little dance of delight before proceeding next into the office in which Linda worked.
Here, we went through a repeat of the performance in Gerda’s office, as if Short Stuff were following a visitor on a tour of the premises.
By the time Trix and I—and whoever—returned to the hallway, Gerda had come out of the master suite to see what was happening. Trixie seemed as unaware of Gerda as she continued to be of me.
After her paws pranced in place, performing another little dance of delight, our girl proceeded along the hallway to my office. There, we watched as she seemed to accompany someone around the room.
I am not a guy who sees ghosts or ever expects to see one. If I need a good scare to get my blood circulating, I just switch on the evening news and see what the latest batch of insane politicians is up to.
I would later publish a series of books about a young man named Odd Thomas, who sees the spirits of the lingering dead. But this peculiar moment with Trixie occurred long before that, when ghost stories were not yet on my agenda.
After leaving my office, in the hallway once more, Trixie stood gazing up at someone about six feet tall, her tail in motion. Then her wagging slowly diminished, stopped. She lowered her head, shook herself, and surveyed her surroundings, at last noticing us. She chuffed and grinned as if to say, Cool, huh? Then she trotted back to the master suite, curled in her bed, and fell asleep.
As I went room to room, turning off lights, I wondered about the history of our house, whether anyone had died in it. Even if someone had hung himself from the foyer chandelier, I couldn’t believe that he would be haunting the place. What’s believable and right in a work of allegorical fiction isn’t easily embraced in real life by a person of reason. I decided not to worry about it when I realized that my good dog’s tail had been wagging vigorously throughout her encounter; she had been enchanted by what she saw, and she wouldn’t be enchanted by a spirit with malevolent intentions.
A couple of friends have suggested that Trixie might have been following a moth in flight or some small winged insect that I didn’t notice. As lame as that explanation is, I considered it. But given how long the episode lasted and how many well-lighted rooms were on the tour, no moth or its equivalent could have escaped my attention.
Besides, Trixie never before or after that event was lured into the pursuit of any insect other than a few fine butterflies on summer days. And those butterfly chases were frisky, leaping exercises in doggy exuberance, nothing like the leisurely walk-around of the second floor that evening.
A number of people have told me stories about their dogs seeming to see things that humans can’t see, although none of their accounts were similar to mine. I do believe Trixie saw something that she found enchanting and that remained beyond my ken. I’ll never know what it might have been—unless in some other plane of existence I am reunited with her one day, and in that new world, she can talk.
During the almost eight additional years that we were fortunate enough to have Trixie, she never repeated that performance, and never exhibited any other kind of fey behavior. Nonetheless, I believe the moment was meaningful, revealing a special quality that cannot be easily defined but that was central to this dog’s uniqueness.